Bloodless Coup

Call Congress: Save Internet Radio

The RIAA - one of my personal favorites - and its lobbying are about to kill internet radio.

If you listen to any internet radio at all, check out these links, and contact your representatives in Congress right away.

1. new royalty rates that could drive Pandora and other webcasters out of business (or at least force them to become artificially similar to terrestrial radio)

2. Thousands of webcasters shut down today in protest of new retroactive royalty rates that would drive most of them out of business or force them into lockstep formation with the terrestrial radio stations many of us have learned to tune out. (One of the worst aspects of the new rates that I didn't mention in the above-linked article is the $500 per-month-per-station minumum payment, which would make customized radio services such as Pandora financially impossible.)

3. In March, the Copyright Royalty Board said that it planned to change the method by which Internet broadcasters would pay for royalties from a per-song to a per-listener rate. This, combined with new base fees of $500 for each separate station that a broadcaster managed, would require many Internet radio stations to pay crippling fees to the Copyright Royalty Board that would essentially put them out of business.

National Public Radio attempted to get a rehearing with the CRB, arguing that the decision was an "abuse of discretion," but their appeal was denied less than a month later. Still, the CRB offered a small reprieve from the threat of retroactive fees in May by extending the deadline for retroactive rates from May 15 to July 15. A couple of weeks later, SoundExchange tweaked its requirements so that smaller broadcasters won't have to pay increased royalties until 2010—a decision that was unpopular with SaveNetRadio, which argued that SoundExchange's offer would still punish larger webcasters while ensuring that smaller ones would never see any growth.

4. Internet-only webcasters and broadcasters that simulcast online will alert their listeners that "silence" is what Internet radio may be reduced to after July 15th, the day on which 17 months' worth of retroactive royalty payments -- at new, exceedingly high rates -- are due to the SoundExchange collection organization, following a recent Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) decision.

To contact your representative, go here for instructions.